Friday, 20 February 2015

The Eco-future I want, and the Kind I Don't

Over on theRPGsite, we've been debating an old blog entry of mine related to a series of predictions or "prophecies" made over the last 20 years by Professional Environmentalist Activists, including very major and well-known figures like Al Gore and David Suzuki, have made about coming eco-apocalypses that turned out not to actually happen. There's been some interesting conversation there, as well as some general obstructionism from people who want to believe Climate Change isn't a real thing on the one side, and people who want to immediately tar anyone who questions the statements of the Environmentalist Lobby as 'anti-science' or 'climate deniers' on the other.

I'll state, like I always do in these entries, that I do accept the reality of Climate Change. That isn't what's at issue here. And that's why this cartoon, however cute, is utterly pointless:

Very amusing, except that it intentionally ignores the real issue. The issue isn't that there's a group out there that doesn't want to create a better world; its that there's a group out there who's vision of a "better world" (and one that they use Climate Alarmism, eg. failed prophecies to try to push forward as "the ONLY choice left or the the world will literally burn in two years!!" etc) is not what most people would think of as a "better world". The Back-to-the-Cave crowd who cry out the hardest for immediate and radical action focused not on innovation but on "sustainability" don't want a world of "healthy children", they want a world with 5/6ths less human children around; but they've gotten very very good at making out anyone who dares to question them in any way as being the ones who are against "giving our children a future".

But let's look at the future they want for children:

I don't think a world where my theoretical children are given a Calorie Ration Card, are told they're allowed one shower per week, only have electricity if the Energy Management Committee judges that the energy from the solar panels on their house aren't better directed to maintaining the lights in the luxury condos for the Ecointern, where they're told what kind of job they can or can't have, where they're allowed or not allowed to live or travel, where they're not allowed to own a car because resources are just too scarce now and they've had to reassign car-ownership to only Elite Class Citizens, and where a series of tests of physical, mental and political worthiness done at adolescence will determined whether they're one of the 16% who are given a license to breed or if they are sterilized for the good of society.

That's not a better world, and that's the world that the Sustainability-crowd seem to desperately want.

I want a better world where we invent tiny machines that clean up the environment, where someone designs a better solar panel (or a better cleaner Nuclear Reactor, or something that makes energy out of our poop, or anything at all) that puts all the oil out of business within ten years and gets to make himself the 21st century's Rockefeller in the process, where we start looking for resources from the moon, asteroids and other planets; where we design artificial grains and artificial meat that's indistinguishable from the real thing and can finally liberate ourselves from dependency on farming and the massive ecological damage farms cause, and where we create computers that are smarter than us and they give us new answers we never could have figured out ourselves. And in the whole process, we keep getting to shower whenever we want, eat what we want, travel where we want, fuck as much as we want, and keep finding our lifestyle IMPROVE rather than being punished by a group of asshole socialist self-styled intelligentsia for the crime of having been born into the fairest, best, most successful Civilization that has ever existed.

5 comments:

Dude, speaking as someone who heats with wood he pulls from his own land, a subsistence level lifestyle is PAINFUL. Every single other part of my life is automated in one way or another, and I'm happy about that. Automation is worth doing well, but that's because it's worth doing to begin with.

Oh hell, I use a chainsaw, the wood-heating system is automated, too . . .

Yup, but the green movement doesn't so much get that as they fantasize over some kind of idyllic hippie "back to the land" fantasy. There's so many environmentalists I've heard over the years talking about how much "gaia cares for us", which is frankly delusional. One reason we went with civilization is because nature is a ruthless monstruous bitch.

The hippies long for a pastoral fairytaleland that never existed; one where no one has to work because fruit just falls off trees into your hands whenever you're hungry and woodland creatures dispense mystical wisdom and Keebler elves build climate-controlled treehouses for us to live in. And they all assume they will be in the "16% elite" category of humanity.

I'd suggest they go live with some of the extant primitive tribes in Africa, New Guinea, the Amazon, or the Sahara and see how they like living conditions, especially on a permanent basis. They'll be crying for their iPads and Priuses and Birkenstocks in no time is my prediction.

As an old-school leftist I want better material life for all which means industrialization of the entire world and heavy use of nuclear energy to supply cheap electricity to the masses. Opposing progress is anything but leftist, no matter how the neo-luddites try to disguise themselves as the "left". "Back to the land" is reactionary by definition.

The serious Marxist left was always in favor of industralization, it's true.But other movements, like Maoism, and that branch of leftism (older than Marx, really) that assumes that man is a 'noble savage' when left untouched only corrupted by the evil of civilization and authority, they are the ones running the show for the left now in most of the world.